Had his invasion of Ukraine taken place as Vladimir Putin had planned, some imagine that it was on the Maidan, the square of independence in kyiv, that the triumphant Russian president would have gone to celebrate the 77and anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazism in World War II. Instead, it’s the parade of a weakened and bogged down army that presided over Monday a Putin placed before the evidence that the Ukrainian nation is not the fiction he claims.
It was striking, in these ceremonies of May 9, to see him, for the first time in his long reign, alone on his platform in Red Square in Moscow, surrounded only by his military coterie. Sign of its international isolation at the same time as the militarization of the regime. It was also striking to hear him justify at length in his speech the launch of his “special operation” in Ukraine, without once mentioning his name, and affirm that Moscow had “done everything”, including diplomatically, to avoid confrontation. with the West. As if he saw that the failures of this war, which he also does not name, presented him with a test of legitimacy. It will also have been significant to hear him for the first time take note of the increasing human costs of the operation and promise to help financially the Russian families of the soldiers killed or wounded. Sign, here, that the springs of its victim propaganda and its apparatus of repression, however powerful they are, collide with reality. Of triumphalism he will therefore have deemed it preferable not to abuse it.
The cogs of Russian propaganda around the Second World War are a complex affair, which goes back to Leonid Brezhnev, who came to power in 1964. It was under Brezhnev, summarizes the daily The world in analysis, that takes shape the myth of the “Great Patriotic War” of the Soviets against the IIIand Reich. The myth is as follows: it was the USSR, and it alone, which liberated Europe from the Hitler regime in the face of a Western Europe and the United States deemed complicit with the Nazis for the purpose of expansion. imperialist.
It was a time when citizen support for the communist project was drastically weakening, which prompted Brezhnev to reconfigure national identity and unity around the consciousness of patriotism. Surfing on this approach, Putin does nothing today by registering the invasion of Ukraine as an extension of this myth of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Insofar as “an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly preparing”, he still defended himself on Monday, “everything indicated that the confrontation with the neo-Nazis would be inevitable”. Beneath the exaggeration that consists in magnifying the presence of the extreme right in Ukraine, Putin opposes above all, of course, a visceral refusal to the idea that the Ukrainians can exist by themselves and build a democracy.
It is, moreover, Russian propaganda which completely ignores the German-Soviet pact signed in Moscow in August 1939 and which we now know that, much more than a non-aggression pact, it in fact established a division of Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. It is in truth because Hitler broke this pact in June 1941 that the USSR entered the war against Berlin. The taboo is such around this diversion of facts that it is sanctioned by a memorial law adopted in 2014.
Putin’s Russia is what a country becomes when social, political, economic, and military violence nullifies any avenue of democratic dialogue — when propaganda erases knowledge. What lessons will we learn from this? We are obviously focused on the aggression of Ukraine, on the massacres of civilians that Putin allows and the muzzling of dissent that he applies inside, but abuses and injustices of this nature occur and reproduce on all sorts of scales around the world.
On an international scale, the war in Ukraine, whatever the outcome, presents at least two pitfalls for the democratic continuation of things: in terms of the militarization of the world, first, in a context where the war gives rise to a riot of military expenditure on the part of the United States and NATO. And then, in the most pressing immediate matter, in terms of food, since Putin, imitating Stalin, is blocking the export of Ukrainian wheat and turning it into a weapon of war, which risks leading to several countries in Asia and Africa what the UN Secretary General has called a “hurricane of famine”.
For people, wars leave traces on bodies, minds and hearts over several generations, said the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who recently visited Montreal for the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. He’s Colombian, you can think he knows what he’s talking about